It's good to be challenged

2,762 views
Added 15 November 2011, 2:24 AM

This weekend, and in to today, I upgraded to the latest version of Mac OS. One interesting thing I noticed is now Apple Mail threads messages, which I never had in my main mail client before. Immediately I noticed e-mails from ocPortal were lumping together when they were really quite unrelated. For example, different hack-attack notifications, or 'this needs validating' notifications, would lump together because they all had the same subject line.

This kind of thing makes you think more clearly about what was just an unconscious piece of friction before: e-mail subject lines really should be more distinguishing, even if it is merely to make scanning through your inbox easier. If I get a hack-attack mail, it should have the IP address in the subject. If I get a 'this need validating' e-mail, it should have the title of the entry needing validating in the subject.

So tonight I've added a new coding standard for this, and am updating our code for the next version.

A second example of an unexpected, but useful, challenge, was a post on the forum asking why the default menu type doesn't allow URLs to be placed on the 'expander links' (when you have a two-level menu), just the end links. At first I thought it was a silly question, because the trays expand via Javascript and aren't for navigating. But actually it's a great question because with thought it is actually obvious that you can have trays that stay open between pages, and hence there is no reason we can't combine a navigation with a tray expansion.

So, the feature was added .

Both these are examples of things we would never have considered unless something had come up to highlight them. I think that's pretty cool.